Special gift cards are a range of merchant category and retailer-specific gift cards produced by 545490 Pty Ltd, the same company behind Karta gift cards. For information about buying gift cards on Special.com.au, see this article.
Types of Special gift cards
Special gift cards are available in two varieties: retailer-specific cards that only work at one shop and merchant category cards that will work at any business in the industry that corresponds to the theme of that card.
For example, a Special Woolworths gift card can only be used at Woolworths Supermarkets whilst a Special Film Buff gift card can be used at any cinema in Australia.
Both types of Special gift cards are essentially prepaid Mastercard gift cards set to only work at certain businesses or merchant categories. This means that a Special gift card for a particular business will often work differently to that same business’ own gift cards.
For example, despite both having the same appearance, a Special Woolworths gift card does not function the same way as a regular Woolworths gift card. When paying with a normal Woolworths gift card you would select the gift card option, whereas with a Special gift card you would enter it in the credit/debit card field if paying online or tap your phone if paying in-store.
The downside of this is that when paying online you can usually only ever use one Special gift card at a time as it’s rare for online merchants to allow you to pay using multiple credit/debit cards.
The upside of this difference is that you can often use Special’s version of a retailer gift card to pay for things that might not be allowed when paying with a regular gift card (e.g. buying another gift card at Woolworths).
Promotions
Special gift cards are occasionally included in publicly available discounts but for the most part their promotions are limited to to certain bank and credit card programmes (e.g. 10% casback up to $10 for CommBank Yello members).
